The Wal-Mart Supercenter in Foster Brook was without power for
roughly 22 hours, starting with Wednesday night’s severe
thunderstorm that swept through the Bradford area.

Officials said the power went out around 7:30 p.m. Wednesday,
and came back on just after 5 p.m. Thursday. During that time,
those at the store were busy handling problems as they came
about.

“What the problem (was) is apparently a tree (that) went down,”
store manager Ron Orris said Thursday afternoon, adding Penelec had
its hands full with various outages across the area. “Four
different poles were taken out, and one pole was split right in
half. Penelec is having a problem getting into the area to fix
them. They actually had to build a bridge. It’s been a long,
drawn-out process for them.”

Penelec representative Russell VanHorn said because of the rough
terrain in the area of Wal-Mart, they had to build a temporary
bridge to get access to the pole.

“We had to build … a temporary bridge to get to the area we
needed to do the work on,” VanHorn said. “We had a tree that came
down outside of the right-of-way, which took out five spans of
conductor, four sets of crosslines on four separate poles and broke
one pole.”

VanHorn said that all the other places that lost power had it
restored on Wednesday evening.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart employees did their best to take care of the
store and its goods.

Orris said they have lots of tools available to them from their
home office in Bentonville, Ark.

“If you remember Hurricane Katrina, we were more prepared than
the U.S. Government,” Orris said. “Wal-Mart is pretty much set for
any crisis. I’ve been here all night, and we’ve been keeping in
touch with the home office. We pretty much do everything by cell
phone (since we only have one phone right now).

“Last night (Wednesday), they brought in a refrigerator truck,
and we loaded all of our perishables into the back of the truck.
Any other problems, we deal with them one at a time. There’s
nothing that we can’t handle.”

The store was closed during the outage because of the lack of
power.

“Even when the power comes on, we still have to get everything
up and running,” Orris said. “We’re hoping to open in the morning.
It’ll take us the night to get everything in order. I feel bad for
the customers that we’re not open, but when we do, we will be ready
for business. We are tentatively looking towards tomorrow morning
(today) to be open.”